


Shatterpoint

by Lolibat



Series: Queen [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Trigger Warning: Death, Trigger warning: suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:21:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26527420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lolibat/pseuds/Lolibat
Summary: “Tell me,” he whispers, a secret only the two of them can hear. “Who do you live for?”The week leading up to Sakura's decision to leave as she dreams. When her dreams feel more real than her reality, what can she do? She falls asleep and wishes to never wake.Prequel to Queen, my dimension travelling Sakura/Sasori fic. Can be read as a standalone fic. Usual trigger warnings of medical horror, death, dark, etc applies.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Sasori
Series: Queen [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1928926
Comments: 4
Kudos: 129





	Shatterpoint

She hears them talking behind her back, their voices cutting across the air like whips aimed at her back.

_Did you hear? Her husband left her again_

_Why am I surprised? It’s more a wonder if she can keep a man around, what with such a nasty temper like hers._

_Can you believe? She picked a traitor at that- guess no one else would want a mean bitch like her._

_And she chased him around the country just to get him to take a second look at her._

_Too bad he ran away with his tail between his legs right after!_

They jest, a right professional sight for supposed nurses. With a team like that, who needs enemies? She thinks bitterly with a grimace. She tries to ignore the bile in her throat, the ache in her muscles, the clench in her fist.

“If you’re done with your gossiping,” She says, carefully keeping the murder out of her smile, “Bed 18 is asking for a bed pan change. Do remember that you need to leave stool samples for him. Three sets. Fresh.” She said, snapping the clipboard at them with each word. Their faces darken at the sight of her, though they were wise enough not to talk back to the head of the hospital.

Sakura grins. “And if you use the wrong containers like you did with bed 12 last time, I’ll make sure to specifically assign you to do it all over again. Until you get it right. Well, hop to it.” She tossed the binder of particulars at her, moving onto the next case in her rounds.

She’s tired. She knows she is- it’s the humid air on a freezing winter’s night that seeps into her bone, marrow deep. It’s the waterfall barrage of stress and obligations that attack her soul relentlessly, wearing it down to a curled up mess, quivering and silent.

They’re not wrong, she knows, even if she doesn’t want to admit. She _had_ chased Sasuke across the country. He married her, fucked her, and left her behind for the dead, with an empty house and an emptier heart. She doesn’t know who to blame, on most days.

She resents. The anger builds behind her sternum, a sour, festering wound that rots within her. She rages at the incompetence of nurses, rages at the patients, rages at the bureaucracy that has nothing to do with her care as a doctor. She rages at her so called husband (she rages at his shadow of his back- the only part she gets to see of him as he leaves her behind with a note and a closed door). She rages at her Hokage who sends him away. She rages at herself.

She hates indiscriminately. Herself of them all- for allowing this abuse of her. For all she is the successor of the Slug Sage, head of Konoha Hospital, and the best medic in the world, somewhere buried deep down, the insecure little girl with the large forehead still cries alone in the dark.

* * *

“Okaeri,” she says tiredly, toeing off her sandals at the end of a long shift- it’s almost midnight, and her work is finally cleared enough that she can see the wood grain of her desk.

There is no reply. She didn’t expect any. She sets her take out on the table (a cold bento picked up from the hospital’s convenience store ten minutes before closing that she got at half off.) The snap of her cheap wooden chopsticks echo loudly in her apartment. The wallpapers are peeling at the corners, the laundry is piled up near the couch, the cups in the sink unwashed. She pays it no mind.

She tosses her trash in the garbage and collapses into her bed after a quick shower. That night, she dreams of a judge, a jury, and a trial. She stands before a panel of people she knows, staring down at her with knowing in their eyes. Kakashi looks at her as she stands, her gaze straightforward and unafraid.

“Tell me, what do you fear the most?” He asks, sure and steady, humor in his tone as if he already knows.

She opens her mouth to reply and wakes up. She doesn’t get to hear her own answer.

* * *

“Sakura-chan!” Naruto crows as he sets Ichiraku takeout on the table and gives her a big hug.

She plasters her best “for patient relatives” smile on her face and exchange pleasantries with the man who funds her hospital.

They make small talk (they talk adult things, adult emotions, forgetting that sometimes the best way to solve problems is to just tackle it headfirst like genin) and they eat their meal. There is stilted silence in the space where Sasuke –used to be, is supposed to be, never is- where Sakura ignores the elephant in the room, ignores the guilt in Naruto’s tired blue eyes as he sees the grief in her own green eyes.

She listens with half an ear as he talks of council, talks of his father’s legacy, his mother’s seals. He’s working on recreating the Hiraishin, she knows. (Somedays she wonders if he’s doing it so he can run away from his own unhappy marriage to a dream he’s trapped by.)

She “oohs and aahs” at the right places, grins and nods and plays the world’s spectator to Naruto’s act as he rolls out scroll after scroll of his own calculations.

She doesn’t wonder why Kakashi stopped coming to “team dinners” with them after the first time. She knows.

* * *

She burns, adrenaline lighting fire through her veins. Eighty-sixty, seventy-fifty four, seventy-fifty two. Her eyes dash to the cardiac monitor- they need to shock- he’s unstable. He needs to be in the ICU.

“Call ICU and get me the defibrillator now! We need to shock him. Call the houseman and tell him to haul his ass right now- we need to get extra IV access and take bloods- set a bag of normal saline full rate. Call the relatives and ask them to come to the hospital.” She barks orders, doing her examination on the fly, her mind running faster than her hands can move.

She needs to shock him now- he’s going to die, she thinks, as fear grips her heart.

Not today, she says firmly and pushes her fear aside. Not if I can help it. She’s going to save this man if it kills her. She remembers the way he looks at her in confusion, barely saying words but trying to answer her questions. He’s still young, she thinks, puzzled. Good health. So what’s wrong with him? She didn’t have time to guess before he went downhill.

The houseman arrives first, does his work in a panic and leaves. The nurses flail about, and her temper frays with every second. ICU gets here, takes one look at the man and makes a beeline towards her. They secure a bed for him in the ICU within minutes.

He’s drowsy… he’s not awake, she thinks- and the nurses still haven’t set up the defibrillator. He’s not going to make it, she thinks. Oh god, how did so many of his organs manage to crash- what did he do? She thinks, flipping through his newly returned lab results and blanching more at each one, the picture becoming clearer with every number she sees but there’s still no answer to the question why.

I don’t know- he needs to be in ICU. He should have been in ICU from the start, a part of her thinks bitterly. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be in my care, a part of her whispers.

She follows him into the ICU. She’s there when they call for an artificial heart. She’s there when they don’t make it in time- when his own beats and beats and fibrillates and gives out in exhaustion. She’s there when they do CPR, she’s there when they shock.

An hour later, she’s gone when they certify his death.

* * *

She dreams, that night, of someone she hasn’t seen in ten years.

“Silly girl, why did you think you can save him? You’re not god. You didn’t have to to try save him. He would have died anyways no matter what. You know that.” Sasori of the Red Sands sits before her, taunts her with a wooden doll sitting on his lap. He picks up the puppet’s hand and strokes it against his cheek. A mocking caress.

“Why do you regret? You know they would never do the same for you.” He says, patient, dead brown eyes asking for answers. “They don’t care.”

“You can’t save him. You can’t save anyone. You couldn’t even save me,” he grins, and suddenly his youthful visage transforms into carnage, blood trickling from his teeth, his wire intestines scattered about and a fist shaped fracture in his chakra heart.

* * *

She burns. She’s tired and exhausted. So tired that she can’t see straight, can’t think straight, can’t walk straight. She sleeps in shattered fragments, each a different insecurity and fear played in theater acts put on by her subconscious mind. It screams something at her and she screams back at the void within her. It’s a shame that the office is only three floors high, she thinks sometimes and pretends she couldn’t stop her own heartbeat with a wave of her own hand. It would be so easy, and she could finally, finally rest.

She goes back to work. There’s a meeting at eleven, clinic at two, a class to teach at five.

She’s going to be late.

* * *

Sasuke never comes back.

Naruto visits but never stays.

Kakashi doesn’t try.

Tsunade’s drunk but looks at her with knowing eyes, tells her she’s doing a good job and to carry on.

Sasori visits her in her dreams, his puppet looking more and more life-like with every dream. She replays his dying words in her mind. “In another world, you could have been my student.” He’s patient with her, undead and unfeeling eyes somehow preferable to the judgement in everyone else’s. She spends hours with him, silent, in his hideouts (hideouts Gaara used to request her to, as Suna works in dismantling his traps. They don’t get very far without her help.)

Sakura cleans her house, when she’s able to, and secretly pilfers Naruto’s Hirashin notes. In the spare minutes between her day (sandwiched in her communte to work, in the minutes after morning rounds, doodled on the margins of her meeting notes), she works on her own secret.

She doesn’t tell Naruto, but she hides how attentively she listens to him speak.

* * *

“Why do you try so hard?” Sasori asks, sitting at the edge of his desk. “They don’t appreciate you. They don’t own you… or do you actually wish to be owned by them?” He leans in close to her ear, his well oiled wooden joints silent as he twirls a lock of her hair.

“Tell me,” he whispers, a secret only the two of them can hear. “Who do you live for?”

She standing before him like in all her other dreams, listening motionlessly as he talks. She doesn’t move, doesn’t talk (she can’t).

“Why do they deserve your sacrifice when all they will do is take, take, and take?” Sasori snarls, the most emotion Sakura has seen since the beginning of her dreams. The resentment the burns in his eyes almost makes him look alive.

“And why would you give?” He paces around her. “They wouldn’t do the same for you. They don’t care if you die. Sasuke wouldn’t know if you died until you were long buried.”

“Don’t you think you’re worth more?” he asks. “What about yourself? What do _you_ want?”

“Won’t you leave this place? Just quit. Leave everyone’s expectations behind and be free, Sakura.” He says.

“You can be free,” he tempts her, a scorpion offering her the forbidden fruit of what she dares not wish for.

Her dream self jolts out of paralysis and straight into waking, the word _free_ on her lips.

* * *

“Be free with me, Sakura,” Sasori’s voice rings in her ears. His hand hovers over her throat- hands that can easily strangle her or snap her neck. She doesn’t care and tilts her head towards him. She rests on his shoulder, and his chin on her collarbone.

It isn’t until she wakes that she realizes that the wooden doll he usually sets on his lap is actually her.

* * *

It is a Tuesday when she finally pieces together her seal. It unravels before her, a masterpiece on its own. It takes her two clones to fully set the seal down, the scroll itself large enough to wall paper her apartment complex. Here, in her own training grounds by the waterfall, she is alone. She leaves them a note telling them not to find her- that they can’t and that they shouldn’t even bother trying. She takes with her all of her money sealed into scrolls, all her possessions and weapons scrolls.

She leaves the team picture on the table, at the spot where Sasuke –would have, should have- sat.

She leaves and doesn’t look back.

**Author's Note:**

> Mandy: Well, this was written in one sitting- took about an hour. Work has been really rough lately, and writing this has been cathartic. This story just wrote itself. I didn't even edit it other than a once over glance. 
> 
> Obviously the Sasori in this fic is Sakura's subconsciousness, and not the actual Sasori in Queen. This is just a peak at Sakura's thoughts behind her decisions to leave her dimension and how she broke into the person she is in Queen. 
> 
> There are some parts in this story that is real or based off of real life for me, but as usual, I enjoy mixing in bits of reality into the stories I write. I'll leave it to you guys to decide which parts are real and which ones aren't. ;)


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